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WWDC 09: the announcements (Updated 10x)

Following is a wrap-up of the announcements at WWDC 2009 in San Francisco today.iPhone 3GS: “The S stands for speed.
Written by Jason D. O'Grady, Contributor

WWDC 09 headerFollowing is a wrap-up of the announcements at WWDC 2009 in San Francisco today.

iPhone 3GS:

  • “The S stands for speed."
  • Launching Messages: 2.1x faster
  • Load SimCity: 2.4x faster
  • Viewing an Excel attachment: 3.6x faster
  • Load NYTimes.com: 2.9x faster
  • Averages 2x speed increase — some things are even faster
  • OpenGL ES 2.0 support
  • 7.2Mbps HSDPA
  • 3 megapixel camera
  • Auto-focus, auto-white balance, auto-exposure, tap-to-focus
  • Better light sensitivity. Auto-macro — close as 10cm away. There’s an API.
  • Video Capture30fps VGA, has an API
  • Scrub and edit the video with your finger
  • Share it from the iPhone to YouTube
  • VoiceControl (”play songs by The Killers”), ask iPhone “what’s playing now?” You can also say “play more songs like this” and Genius will play more songs like this.
  • Digital CompassIntegrated into maps — shows compass to use orientation on maps.
  • Hardware encryptionRemote wipe, encrypted iTunes backups
  • Improved battery lifeUp to 9 hours WiFi, 10 hours video, 30 hours audio, 12 hours 2G talk, 5 hours 3G talk time.
  • $199 / 16GB
  • $299 / 32GB
  • Available: June 19
  • Keeping the iPhone 3G for only $99

iPhone 3.0 demos:

  • Gameloft's Asphalt 5Racecar sim with Bluetooth P2P multi-player
  • AirStrip Critical CareMedical appalerts Doctor with patient data. The monitor window for  looks pretty amazing. “The medical community is flocking to the iPhone." Dock-connector accessory possibilities are almost endless “I can look at this real-time waveform data even if I’m not at the bedside.” Showing zooming, scrubbing to look for abnormalities.
  • ScrollMotion's iPhone book storeContains over 500 best-selling book, 50 major magazines, 170 daily newspapers, and 1m books. Whoa. Take that Kindle!
  • TomTomTurn-by-turn directions and a car-kit with: windshield mount (portrait or landscape modes), dock with power, speaker, GPS enhancer, handsfree calling, and audio output. Availability: Summer, Price; TBA.
  • ngmoco StarDefense3D tower defense game with multi-touch support and expansion sold through in-app purchases.
  • PascoK-12 science app.
  • ZipCar — 6,000 self-service vehicles in US & UK, 300k members. Instant car location and reservation via GPS and the new embedded Google Maps integration. (I’m a ZipCar customer, so this is pretty neat.) You can even activate the car horn remotely (to find the car) through the app!
  • Line 6 and Chordmaster — Control your guitar and amp from your iPhone

iPhone SDK 3.0:

  • 1,000 new APIs
  • In-app purchases
  • CoreLocation: turn-by-turn directions and embeddable Google Maps
  • Push Notifications: alerts, sounds, badges

iPhone OS 3.0:

  • A major new upgrade to iPhone.
  • Cut/copy/paste
  • Landscape mode
  • MMS
  • Rent or purchase iTunes content from the phone
  • Tethering: 42 partners at launch, no AT&T
  • Safari Javascript benchmarks 3x faster
  • Auto-fill
  • HTM5 support (with offline db support) and audio/video tags
  • 30+ languages supported: Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and others
  • New feature: Find my iPhone. Log into MobileMe and it shows you on a map where your phone is. Also: “Send it a message, have it play a sound (whether or not you left it in silent mode) and the waiter can find it and call you.”
  • Remote wipe

iPhone:

  • "it’s been an incredible year for the iPhone. It was less than a year ago that we released iPhone 2.0…”
  • Developers have downloaded the SDK over a million times.
  • More than 50,000 apps on the App Store
  • Sold more than 40m iPhones and iPod touches.
  • On April 21 crossed over a billion apps downloaded

Exchange support:

  • Built-into Mail, iCal, and Address Book
  • Bertrand: “It’s so ironic that we have Exchange support for no extra charge, while Windows PCs have it as an extra product.”

Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6):

  • Refinements across the board
  • Powerful new technologies
  • Exchange support
  • “We decided to refine 90% of the OS.”
  • Finder completely rewritten — the user won’t see any changes.
  • Dock has Expose support — click and hold, voila, you get the window you want
  • Install is up to 45% faster
  • After you install Snow Leopard you recover over 6GB of disk space!
  • Over half the footprint of the OS.
  • Mail is up to 2.3x faster
  • Price: $29 (Leopard was $129)
  • Family pack: $49
  • Available September

Safari 4:

  • Now shipping for Leopard, Tiger and Windows
  • Now bad plug-ins crash inside the browser and don't crash the OS (or the browser)
  • More Javascript speed in Safari: 50% faster in 64-bit
  • 100/100 on Acid3 test (IE8 scored 21/100)
  • Full history search
  • Cover Flow view of the browsing history

QuickTime X:

  • Modern foundation
  • Hardware acceleration
  • ColorSync
  • HTTP streaming
  • New invisible UI: window title bar fades to a borderless box of video
  • One-click clip trimming
  • One-click uploading to YouTube and MobileMe

New MacBooks after the jump...

New MacBook Air:

  • 1.8GHz for $1,499 ($300 less than before)
  • 128GB model for $1,799 ($700 less)

New 13-inch MacBook Pro:

  • New 7 hour fixed battery
  • Built-in SD card slot
  • FireWire 800
  • LED-backlit keyboard
  • Starts at $1,199

New 15-inch MacBook Pro:

  • 2.53/2.66/2.8GHz
  • $1,699/$1,999/$2,299
  • Top two configurations have: 9400M + 9600M GT
  • New seven hour (fixed) battery
  • Over 1,000 recharge cycles (average is ~300)
  • Batteries have five year lifetime (longer than most notebooks)
  • New built-in SD card slot (loses the ExpressCard slot)
  • Up to 8GB of memory
  • Same glossy display

New 17-inch MacBook Pro:

  • Keeps ExpressCard slot
  • Same fixed battery

Image Courtesy: Apple

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